yed on the Rhone and in the north of Italy,
were at least as formidable a body of barbarians as those which four
centuries afterwards overturned the western empire. The forces whom
Caesar conquered in Gaul, Trajan on the Danube, were to the full as
powerful as those which carried the standards of the Goths and Vandals
to Athens and Carthage. AEtius, in the decline of the empire, and with
the mingled Roman and barbarian force of Gaul alone, defeated Attila in
the plenitude of his power, at the head of three hundred thousand men,
on the field of Chalons.

Belisarius, with fifteen thousand men, recovered Africa from the
Vandals; thirty thousand legionary soldiers did the same by Italy under
Narses, and overthrew the whole power of the Goths. So high did the
Roman soldiers still stand even in the estimation of their enemies, that
Totila, the warlike monarch of the Goths, strove to bribe them into his
service by offers of high pay. None had yet been approved equal to these
legionary soldiers in battle; and the manner in which, with infinitely
inferior forces, they repelled the barbarians on all sides, decisively
demonstrates this superiority. The vigour and ability of Heraclius so
restored the empire, when wellnigh sinking under the might of its
enemies, that for a century it was regarded with awe by the barbarous
nations all round its immense frontier. The five provinces beyond the
Euphrates were conquered by the Romans from the Parthians during the
decline of the empire. Nothing is so remarkable, in the last three
centuries of Roman history, as the _small number_ of the forces which
combated around the Eagles, and the astonishing victories which, when
led by ability, they gained over prodigious bodies of their enemies. The
legions had dwindled into battalions, the battalions into cohorts. The
four hundred and fifty thousand men who under Augustus guarded the
frontiers of the empire, had sunk to one hundred and fifty thousand in
the time of Justinian.[3] But this hundred and fifty thousand upheld the
Eastern empire for a thousand years. So feeble were the assaults of the
barbarians, that for above two centuries of that time the single city of
Constantinople, with the aid of the Greek fire, defended itself with
scarce any territory from which to draw support. It was not the strength
of its enemies, therefore, but the weakness of itself, which, after an
existence in the West and East of _two thousand years_, at length
extingu